Those old memories are perhaps more vivid because his life has been so limited ever since. When he called last weekend, I was baking a cake and so we chatted a bit about that, and then the dark rum I put in it made me ask about his first drink (emptying the bottles his mother and her friends had left a little in) and about the men hanging out all day drinking from bottles encased in brown paper bags in the poor neighborhood he grew up in in south-west Los Angeles. He called when I was driving home from doing get-out-the-vote work in Nevada so my friend Anna and I told him what we did and how it works. He called when I was at the airport protest against the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban, so I put him on speakerphone and let him listen to the chants and shouts, and I swear he was more present for it than I was. Jarvis has called when I’m hiking and I’ve tried to take him with me, describing the terrain as vividly as I can, huffing and puffing a little while clambering uphill. Once, when we were talking about what his life might be like when he gets out, he was startled to realize he could see a bunch of his friends at once, perhaps because he’s seen us one or two at a time all these years. He’s a well-read and observant person, but I suspect he hasn’t even walked across grass in all those years. Sometimes I feel like I’m friends with Helen Keller – on a recent visit I was, at his request, describing a place I’d been hiking and he asked me to remind him what moss is. To live for 41 years in a small cage in a concrete structure is to be profoundly sensorily deprived, and that’s made him eager for secondhand evidence of the outside world. That’s usually not what he wants to talk about, although, during a recent in-person visit, he told a very funny story about Charles Manson from when Manson had the cell next to him. We laugh and joke a lot and talk about everything under the sun, but not much about daily life on death row in San Quentin state prison.
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